Presentation: Movements between “Black Annotation” and “Black Reduction” – Artistic Strategies of Working with Archival Material in the frame of Violence in the Arts, UdK Berlin, 3rd of December, 2018

The concepts of “Black Annotation” and “Black Reduction”, introduced by Christina Sharpe in her book In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2017) offer fruitful paths when trying to think about artistic modes of working with archival material that refuse to play into the spectacle of Black suffering, thereby aiming at working against the prevailing repetition of violent regimes of looking. Drawing on examples of films and visual works that were developed within the ongoing PhD-in-Practice research project The Non-Human. The Believer. The Alien – Unsettling Innocence, the aim of the presentation is to highlight how artistic research serves as a mode of actively challenging “strategies of amnesia” (El Tayeb, 2011).